dimanche 14 mai 2017

Ten Ways To Make Real Money In Virtual Worlds

As thepopularity and sophistication of MMORPGs has skyrocketed,
enterprising gamers have found ways to make real money playing them–to
the point where experts say that it has become common to run across
gamers who make their entire income with virtual jobs.
“It’s eminently doable,” says Edward Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. “If a person in Shanghai can live on a dollar a day, they can make their living playing video games.”
Gamers mine virtual worlds for currency, build virtual real estate
empires and even sell their virtual bodiesall in the name of real-world
profit.
One such entrepreneur is Julian Dibbell, a contributing editor for Wired
magazine, who in 2003 challenged himself to spend a year making a
living as a retailer in the massively multiplayer game Ultima Online.
Dibbell sold in-game items, currency and real estate on
eBay
, eventually making almost $4,000 a month in profits,
translating into roughly a $36,000-a-year salary. And Dibbell says that
his income only qualifies as lower-middle class among virtual
businessmen.
“There are people making six figures,” Dibbell says. “One-man
operations, basically, doing seven figures. It’s not hard to make money
doing this.”
The upshot, Dibbell says, is that as more users find ways to wring
dollars out of gold pieces, games like World of Warcraft develop
sophisticated economies, with measurable GDPs and exchange rates.
“On one level, there’s very little that distinguishes this world from
the real world,” Dibbell says. And indeed when he talks about his
experience–which he has documented in his new book Play Money–it is sometimes hard to tell that he is talking about a universe that doesn’t exist.
There’s Dibbell’s story about a real estate tycoon who pounced on
foreclosed residences, invested in renovations, and sold them–making
around $40,000 a year in the process.
Or the one about the turf wars between bands of gold farmers, who
would tip off the authorities when rival cartels encroached on their
territory.
The similarities between virtual economies and real ones have
emerged, Dibbell says, because MMORPGs have introduced the concept of
scarcity to their games.
“What’s kind of weird and interesting about these worlds is that it
turns out that while a world of very negligible scarcity is appealing on
one level, it’s not very fun as a game,” Dibbell says. “The whole point
of these games is to reintroduce a certain level of scarcity. And
that’s weird, in the context of the Internet, but it tends to make these
economies much more like the real world.”
Game developers have reacted in various ways to the phenomena of
people earning their livings on their servers. In May, Blizzard, the
publisher of World of Warcraft, banned over 30,000 gamers who were using
automated processes to harvest gold, and removed over 30 million gold
pieces ($4,048,582, according to GameUSD.com’s latest exchange rate)
from the game’s economy. Sony, on the other hand, recently opened
Station Exchange, an online marketplace where EverQuest II gamers can
buy, sell and trade currency and items. Second Life, a comparatively
small MMORPG, has an official currency exchange Web site and a boutique
where users can buy computer hardware and other real-world commodities
for Linden dollars, the game’s in-world currency.
The trend has also attracted some attention from real-world
governments. China, where many gold-farming companies are based,
reportedly began penalizing gamers who play massively multiplayer games
for more than three consecutive hours. And Castronova says there are
indications that the Korean government is considering penalizing
real-money trade in online games as a “disruption of business.”
After a year of trafficking in virtual items, Dibbell went to the IRS
to ask if his virtual commerce should be taxed. “Their answer was
‘yeah, that’s very plausible, we just don’t know,’” Dibbell says.
Given the IRS’ very inclusive barter income rules, Dibbell says, even
gamers who have no interest in turning gold pieces into dollars could
eventually be subject to taxation, since the items being traded have
fair market values.